Thursday, Jul 2nd, 2009 ↓
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Monday, Jun 1st, 2009 ↓
multi-tasking on the front porch
multi-tasking on the front porch
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Thursday, May 7th, 2009 ↓

Apple wireless keyboard & mouse $100

Apple Wireless Keyboard & Mouse comboThis not a bad price for Apple’s attractive and discontinued wireless keyboard & mouse combo. If you prefer a keyboard with full-size keys (unlike the chicklet keys on Apple’s slim aluminum keyboard), this is the most used keyboard in my office. However, the Mighty Mouse is not my most favored pointing device.
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Tuesday, Apr 14th, 2009 ↓
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Monday, Apr 6th, 2009 ↓
salvaging parts from one dead PowerMac to repair what ails another
salvaging parts from one dead PowerMac to repair what ails another
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Thursday, Apr 2nd, 2009 ↓
progress on the wall, from Ryan Christensen’s Graffiti album
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Wednesday, Apr 1st, 2009 ↓
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Sunday, Mar 29th, 2009 ↓
resuming my work / after a weekend too brief / this porch too pleasant.
resuming my work / after a weekend too brief / this porch too pleasant.
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Sunday, Mar 22nd, 2009 ↓
running diagnostic utilities on a flakey laptop
running diagnostic utilities on a flakey laptop
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Friday, Mar 20th, 2009 ↓
today’s office in southern Maryland
today’s office in southern Maryland
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Wednesday, Mar 4th, 2009 ↓
after days of rain, the portable office found a place in the sun
after days of rain, the portable office found a place in the sun
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Thursday, Feb 26th, 2009 ↓
today’s office after packing nonessentials and removing the furniture
today’s office after packing nonessentials and removing the furniture
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Wednesday, Feb 25th, 2009 ↓
“Everything is so amazing and nobody is happy” - Louis CK with Conan O’Brien (via Technium, 23 February 2009)
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Wednesday, Feb 11th, 2009 ↓

Data Recovery Services

Another colleague reports that her hard drive died this week; and she has not been backing up regularly. Recovering data from a dead or dying hard drive is not easy, and therefore expensive.

Not long ago, another client paid a data recovery company about $3000 to retrieve the contents of her hard drive. She arranged this service through her local computer store, based on their advise. The company recovered most of her files, but delivered the results as a somewhat disjointed bunch of files. My client, not knowing how to parse through these files and restore them where they belong on her new hard drive, hired me to sort that out, and also setup a backup system to prevent this need from recurring.

Data recovery from an utterly dead drive is so painfully expensive, because the process is painstaking and mechanical, often starting with dismantling your damaged hard drive in a costly “cleanroom”. If you’re running a business, time is money, and your data is valuable. If you need your lost data right away, you probably need to bite the bullet, cough up a few $1000 bucks, and have your drive sent to a data recovery company, pronto.

Sometimes it’s possible to recover your data for a fraction of that cost, if you can wait a little longer to get it back. I’ve successfully recovered the full contents of many dying and malfunctioning hard drives, using simpler data recovery tools. The potential results depend on the severity and type of damage your particular drive has sustained. If it works, you’ll only be out a few hundred bucks (not thousands) for my time. If these methods can’t recover you drive, you’ll be out $150 for the time it takes me to determine the problem is too severe for this simpler fix, and the time it took to try.

If I can’t fix or recover your drive on the cheap, I can personally arrange the services of a high end data recovery vendor. These companies are accustomed to dealing with IT and computer store staff. I can talk to them in GeekSpeak, and to you in plain English. If you like, I can also setup your new and/or backup hard drive, using the data that is recovered.

Of course, you can avoid all these costs by backing up your data today, and on a regular basis hereafter, taking my free advice about how to backup your data while you sleep and work. Remember, every machine with moving parts will eventually break. The platters in your hard drive are revolving 4,000 to 10,000 times per second, with tolerances so tight that a grain of dust could scrape data off those platters. Be ready, with a full backup, for the day your drive dies.

And you can get more free advice in the future, by reading Mykl.biz or following my posts via FacebookTwitter or RSS.

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Monday, Feb 9th, 2009 ↓

replacing your Mac's hard drive

Today, a friend’s MacBook wouldn’t bootup, but made a ”funny sickly spinning clicking sound under keyboard”.  That sounds like a dying hard drive.  My advice?

On a MacBook or iMac, replacing the internal hard drive is dead simple.  If you can clip your own fingernails and pluck an eyebrow, you have the manual dexterity to accomplish this.

Go to the MyOWC page at Other World Computing.  Tell it what model Mac you have.  From their list, buy the biggest, fastest internal hard drive you can afford.  While you’re there, take a look at or download their good how-to-install videos.

Right about now is when you wish you’d been using SuperDuper the way I describe in “Backup Your Data While You Sleep”.  Nothing can put things back as they were faster and easier than the proper preventative use of SuperDuper.  (Well, nothing easier than paying someone like me to do it for you.)

Don’t throw out your seemingly dead hard drive, yet. If you’re really lucky, you might still access it’s contents one last time, by connecting it to your computer as an external drive, using a $30 doodad like Newer Technology’s Universal Drive Adapter. If you can get your old drive to appear in the Finder, you may be able to restore all it’s contents (the System, applications, documents, photos, music, etc.) to your newly installed hard drive, saving yourself a sh_t load of time and bother (compared to starting from scratch).  You can attempt such a restore using Apple’s Disk Utility or SuperDuper.

Leave a comment if you have questions about any of this.

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